About

The Capra/Bailey Project is dedicated to understanding Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life as an important piece of American political culture. The political life of a people is made up not only of the debates over the specific policy programs of competing political parties; it is also held together by broadly shared narratives of how the world should work. It’s a Wonderful Life is one such narrative that cable television brought back into American life more than thirty years ago. This website is one effort to better understand that story’s relationship to the lives Americans lived in the past, and to the lives they live today.